Research Ethics in Education

• In Event: Philosophical Inquiry as Consequential Research: Interrogating the Means and Ends of Ethics and Education

Abstract

How to ethically inquire with a world that is perpetually afire? Our contemporary times are imbued with the force of crises extending from an entangled stratum of political, environmental, economic, and viral conditions. As such, this paper begins with two overarching assumptions: 1) our crisis-laden world requires inquiry practices that build on affirmative and relational ethical orientations; 2) methodologies both code and encode, simultaneously operating to reinscribe conventional limits on our contemporary moment and generating thresholds for ways of living otherwise. As a means to imagine alternatives to our crisis-laden status quo, this paper critiques inquiry work built on ethical claims steeped in principles of liberal humanism: privileging individualism, synthetic declarations of findings, and particular formations of knowledge. Within such circumstances, justice often articulates as espoused practices of resisting institutions already in decline (this is justice in a sovereign sense, more directly understood as the rendering—and unquestioned protection—of individualized rights).
As an alternative, I offer a sense of inquiry as an interventional making—generative acts that short-circuit the status quo such that open-ended alternatives are newly present, though not-yet determined. I argue for an alignment of critical inquiry work as a practice of “making the just”—an enacted ethical process grounded in relational materialism that orients from Michel Foucault’s sense of justice as an articulation of living resistance differently, according to an ethical determination attuned to (and resistant of) a shared contemporary moment. To “make the just” we cannot rely on conventional ethical views that derive from discreet rights emanating from particular subjects. Instead, we need a relational conception of our shared world, one that is generated through an ethical reconsideration of both subjects and publics that disrupts our addiction to liberal humanism.
Organizationally, I structure this paper according to two overarching parts. Part One explicates a liberal humanist justice frame, dependent on moral claims of particular identity and individualized rights. Inherent within this conservative frame are assumptions concerning what registers as a crisis worthy of response, the directional properties of such a response, and the moral claims meant to animate both individual and governmental practices of response. Both crisis and response foreground a normative logic that, in turn, frames possible methodological actions and events, what I term conventional qualitative research.
The second part of this article suggests that ethical inquiry might usefully refuse governing processes and structures aimed to stay transformation and alter the conditions for relational change such that normalized individuation is made less habitual. Inquiry as a practice of making the just offers different ethical entanglements to generate different futures, a potential that extends beyond the conventional logics that inform contemporary crises (and our normalized responses to them). Such inquiry is animated by relational ethics and articulates as a practice of critical engagement with living such that current conditions and logics can no longer operate smoothly even as alternatives to the crisis-laden status quo are generated as a matter of ethical necessity.

Author

• Aaron M. Kuntz, Florida International University
  Presenting Author